- EverVigilant.net -"The condition upon which God hath given liberty to man is eternal vigilance; which condition if he break, servitude is at once the consequence of his crime and the punishment of his guilt." - John Philpot Curran

As of today, EverVigilant.net will no longer be updated. Instead, I would like to introduce my new blog, Liberty Sentry. Its purpose, as it was with this one, is to help safeguard liberty by keeping a watchful eye on government. In order to do that, we must remain actively informed.

My intention is to update Liberty Sentry daily. While you will find the occasional original essay or commentary, the site will mostly feature links to news stories that document the immediate dangers posed to freedom-loving citizens, namely the ever-increasing encroachment on civil liberties and the abuses of power on the part of those who refer to themselves as "public servants."

EV had a good run, but it's time to move on. Please let your friends know about the new blog, and don't forget to update your bookmarks.

[Matthew] Clark and Gregory Malandrucco were about to leave after eating at Arturo's Tacos, 2001 N. Western Ave. Clark said officers shoved them out of the way because Malandrucco accidently blocked the officers' path as he was trying to put on his coat.

When they got to the parking lot, Clark said the officers attacked them both.

"There was nothing that could have caused something like this to occur. ... It didn't seem like there was any problem and then the next thing I knew, I was just being violently beaten."

The officers were allegedly waiting for them in the parking lot, and began to yell at the men in an aggressive manner, the suit claims. The two men attempted to calm the officers down by trying "to shake hands, make peace and suggesting that everyone go home since nothing had happened," the suit said.

It was at that time that the male officer "without warning" punched Clark and began to strike him repeatedly, throwing him to the ground, the suit said.

The plainclothes officers then held Clark down and "brutally beat him until he lost consciousness," according to the suit.

When Malandrucco attempted to stop the beating, according to the suit, the officers "responded by beating (him). (They) threw Mr. Malandrucco to the ground, hitting his head against the concrete and knocking him unconscious."

Just another example of what it's like to be protected and served in America.

Frustrated that people continued to consume so much alcohol even after it was banned, federal officials had decided to try a different kind of enforcement. They ordered the poisoning of industrial alcohols manufactured in the United States, products regularly stolen by bootleggers and resold as drinkable spirits. The idea was to scare people into giving up illicit drinking. Instead, by the time Prohibition ended in 1933, the federal poisoning program, by some estimates, had killed at least 10,000 people.

Although mostly forgotten today, the "chemist's war of Prohibition" remains one of the strangest and most deadly decisions in American law-enforcement history. As one of its most outspoken opponents, Charles Norris, the chief medical examiner of New York City during the 1920s, liked to say, it was "our national experiment in extermination."

Tom Engelhardt of Antiwar.com looks at the threat of terrorist attacks in the U.S. from a different perspective:

In 2008, 14,180 Americans were murdered, according to the FBI. In that year, there were 34,017 fatal vehicle crashes in the U.S. and, so the U.S. Fire Administration tells us, 3,320 deaths by fire. More than 11,000 Americans died of the swine flu between April and mid-December 2009, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention; on average, a staggering 443,600 Americans die yearly of illnesses related to tobacco use, reports the American Cancer Society; 5,000 Americans die annually from food-borne diseases; an estimated 1,760 children died from abuse or neglect in 2007; and the next year, 560 Americans died of weather-related conditions, according to the National Weather Service, including 126 from tornadoes, 67 from rip tides, 58 from flash floods, 27 from lightning, 27 from avalanches, and 1 from a dust devil.

As for airplane fatalities, no American died in a crash of a U.S. carrier in either 2007 or 2008, despite 1.5 billion passengers transported. In 2009, planes certainly went down and people died. In June, for instance, a French flight on its way from Rio de Janeiro to Paris disappeared in bad weather over the Atlantic, killing 226. Continental Connection Flight 3407, a regional commuter flight, crashed into a house near Buffalo, N.Y., that February killing 50, the first fatal crash of a U.S. commercial flight since August 2006. And in January 2009, US Airways Flight 1549, assaulted by a flock of birds, managed a brilliant landing in New York's Hudson River when disaster might have ensued. In none of these years did an airplane go down anywhere due to terrorism, though in 2007 two terrorists smashed a Jeep Cherokee loaded with propane tanks into the terminal of Glasgow International Airport. (No one was killed.)

And yet the underwear bomber (which was most likely a false-flag operation anyway) had people panicking about another 9/11. Perhaps we should all try to keep the threat of terrorism in perspective.